I’m Worried about My Anxiety

ovelist and memoirist Clancy Martin (please read

, the novel he released last year with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and “Lisa,” his deeply sad remembrance of his sister in our recent Catastrophes Issue) is a vital member of today’s philosophy community. He is a repeat translator of Nietzsche (

in 2006 and an upcoming edition of

) and he serves as Department of Philosophy chair at the University of Missouri—Kansas City. He’s also authored, coauthored, or edited multiple volumes of philosophy. For this issue, we asked Clancy to take a quick stab at existentialism and what it is, or was, or still is, or should be.

Since it’s usually bandied about by the most pretentious, clove-cigarette-smoking, beret-wearing students in your local high school, existentialism has become a subset of 20th-century philosophy that is much maligned and even more misunderstood. That’s a shame, because it’s actually very useful. So here we go, reclaiming existentialism from the hands of the dilettantes and detractors who’ve so callously abused it.

Pssst, click here to hear the essay read by a philosophy major after drinking two bottles of wine and smoking some weed.

Greatest Hits of the Existentialists

angst

Sisyphus’s drag alter-ego Sissy Fuss, as drawn by Jim Krewson.

to be something other than what we are

you

Ecce Homo

to

for

The Concept of Anxiety